“The Blackness of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity in 20th/21st Century African American Culture

277 Pages·2017·2.25 MB·English

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Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses
November 2017
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Casey Hayman
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Hayman, Casey, "“The Blackness of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity in 20th/21st Century African
American Culture" (2017). Doctoral Dissertations. 1097.
https://doi.org/10.7275/10473016.0 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1097
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“The Blackness of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity in 20th/21st Century
African American Culture

A Dissertation Presented

by

CASEY J. HAYMAN

Submitted to the Graduate School of the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

September 2017

Department of English
© Copyright by Casey J. Hayman 2017

All Rights Reserved
“The Blackness of Blackness”: Meta-Black Identity in 20th/21st Century
African American Culture

A Dissertation Presented

by

CASEY J. HAYMAN

Approved as to style and content by:

____________________________________
Nicholas Bromell, Chair

____________________________________
Emily Lordi, Member

____________________________________
James Smethurst, Member

____________________________________
Randall Knoper, Department Chair
Department of English
DEDICATION

For Vanessa, Josephine, and Ellison--my inspiration and motivation through it all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I owe a sincere debt of gratitude to my committee chair, Nick
Bromell. Our conversations always leave me inspired to write and read more, and I could
not have done this without your graciousness in spending so much time with draft after
draft. You paid attention to my prose on the macro- and micro- levels, and I believe that
the final product is hugely improved as a result. Thank you for your faith in me, and for
your patience.
Secondly, I could not have asked for two better committee members than Emily
Lordi and James Smethurst. You have gone above and beyond the call of duty in offering
me timely and incisive feedback and support. Given this dedication and attention on the
part of my committee, it should go without saying (but I will say it anyhow) that any
errors or shortcomings contained herein are solely my own.
I am also thankful for all of the wonderful professors that I have had here at
UMass, in whose seminars many of the ideas contained in this dissertation were
incubated. Thanks especially to TreaAndrea Russworm, Joe Skerrett, Laura Doyle,
Randall Knoper, Asha Nadkarni, Suzanne Daly, Hoang Phan, Steven Tracy, and David
Lenson. Your work and teaching has been inspiring, and has raised the standards to
which I hold myself.
Thanks are also due to all of the professors and mentors who essentially taught me
how to teach here at UMass: David Fleming, Peggy Woods, everyone in the UMass
Writing Program, Deb Carlin, Nick Bromell, TreaAndrea Russworm, Laura Furlan,
Suzanne Daly, and Asha Nadkarni. I came here with no teaching experience at all, and
you all helped nurture in me a talent and passion for teaching literature and culture.
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Thank you to Alice Knox Eaton, Paul Thifault, and the Humanities department at
Springfield College for having faith in my teaching ability and throwing me into the fire
of my first full-time teaching gig. I am without a doubt a much better educator for it.
Thank you to those editors and readers who helped to shape much of the material
that would become part of this dissertation. Some, of course, were anonymous, but I owe
thanks to Candice Jenkins, Nathan Grant, Aileen Keenan, Tracy Floreani, A. Yemisi
Jimoh, Matthew Calihman, and Martha Cutter.
I appreciate the ever-evolving community of fellow graduate students and friends
that I have developed here at UMass, but special appreciation to Darren Lone Fight for
being a great friend, writing partner, and confidante. Thanks, too, to Lisha Storey,
Neelofer Qadir, and Adam Colman for forming a writing group that finally worked for
me.
It has been a long, winding road to get to this point, and above all, I would never
have made it this far without the unconditional love and support of my family. Vanessa,
thank you for your patience and shoulder to lean on. Josephine and Ellison, thank you for
making it so hard to leave to go to work, but so wonderful to come back home. Being a
parent is challenging enough, and trying to complete a dissertation as a parent is
especially trying, and so I owe especial love and gratitude to the family network who
helped and supported us through this process: John Hayman, and Catherine Burbank,
James and Darlene Cerillo, Tate Hayman, Lauren Cerillo and Will Paulding. Thank you
for always being willing to lend a helping hand, to say that this would not be possible
without you would be an understatement--so much love to you all.
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ABSTRACT
“THE BLACKNESS OF BLACKNESS”: META-BLACK IDENTITY IN 20TH/21ST
CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN CULTURE

SEPTEMBER 2017

CASEY J. HAYMAN, B.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

Directed by: Professor Nicholas Bromell

The central claim in this dissertation is that much contemporary African
American cultural expression would be better conceptualized not as “post-black,” as
some would have it, but as what I call “meta-black.” I use the preface “meta-” because
while this contemporary black identity also resists sometimes constrictive conceptions of
“authentic” black identity from within the African American community, I diverge from
theorists of “post-blackness” in observing the ways that, as Nicole Fleetwood observes,
blackness necessarily “circulates” within a technologically-driven mediascape, and these
postmodern black subjects work within and against the constraints of this aural-visual
regime of blackness in order to perform subjectivities that exceed the containment of
these stereotypical representations.
From Du Bois’s debate with Marcus Garvey over issues of assimilation and
separatism, to the Black Arts movement’s attempts to articulate a distinctly black
aesthetic and cultural identity, to recent debates by scholars across the disciplines like
Fred Moten and Tommie Shelby, and “black pessimists” like Frank Wilderson, Saidiya
Hartman, and Jared Sexton over the metaphysical and pragmatic value of blackness as
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identity in a post-civil rights era, the problem of the meaning of black identity in the
United States lies at the center of African American politics and cultural expression. The
Blackness of Blackness approaches this problem through close analyses of the work and
public personas of a set of artists spanning a number of cultural mediums, including
authors such as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Percival Everett; musicians such as
Louis Armstrong, Nicki Minaj, and Beyoncé; and filmic icons such as Sidney Poitier. I
claim that this notion of meta-blackness more accurately accounts for the ways that
African American subjects from the mid-20th century on, living in an increasingly mass-
mediated American cultural landscape, have adopted a novel approach to articulating
subjectivities that resist stereotypical notions of blackness proffered in the sphere of
popular culture, and demonstrate how these artists’ meta-black aesthetics model
possibilities for contemporary blackness.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. ..................................................................................................v

ABSTRACT. ..................................................................................................................... vii

INTRODUCTION. ..............................................................................................................1

CHAPTER

1. BLACKNESS IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION:
MUSIC AND THE PHONO/GRAPHIC SELF IN W.E.B. DU BOIS'S
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK AND JAMES WELDON JOHNSON'S
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN .......................................22

2. "BLACK IS . . . BLACK AIN'T": RALPH ELLISON'S META-BLACK
AESTHETIC AND THE "END" OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE ..68

3. "MY IMAGE OF YOU IS NOW STRANGE": JAMES BALDWIN,
JACK KEROUAC, AND THE CHANGING MEANING OF THE MID-
20TH CENTURY COLOR LINE" ........................................................................106

4. PINK LEMONADE: BEYONCĖ, NICKI MINAJ, AND A META-
BLACK HIP HOP FEMINST AESTHETIC .......................................................148

5. TOWARDS AN OPTIMISTIC PESSIMISM: PERCIVAL EVERETT,
CLAUDIA RANKINE, AND META-BLACK LITERARY AESTHETICS IN
THE CONTEMPORARY MOMENT .................................................................192

CONCLUSION. ...............................................................................................................242

BIBLIOGRAPHY. ...........................................................................................................254

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